Have you ever trusted God, putting yourself out there only to suffer miserably for it?

Christians have been experiencing this for centuries.

In general most are shocked, surprised, confused, and often angry. Honestly, we don't really know what to make of it. So let me just admit up front that a column like this won't offer an ultimate solution to the questions. But I do want to share what has helped me not only as a Pastor in counseling others but from my own life experiences of unexplained suffering.

An author who has been an immense help to me over the years is Elizabeth Elliot. She was the wife of the martyred missionary Jim Elliot, who along with four others, was killed while attempting to evangelize the Waodani people in Ecuador (www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waodani and www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ecuador).

Years later she wrote a book called "No Graven Image." The novel was a fictional book of a missionary woman named Margaret who gave up her life, her career, her money to take the gospel to a forgotten place of the world. Her greatest mission was to translate the Bible into the people's native language.

Along the way she meets a man who is the only person who knows English as well as the native language, thus giving Margaret the ability to begin translating the Bible into the people's native tongue. However, something goes horribly wrong. The translator gets very ill, needing immediate medical attention. Margaret in her haste administers the wrong medicine and it's an innocent mistake that ends up being the very thing that takes his life.

The natives become enraged and blame Margaret for his death. She loses all her ability to translate the Bible as well as any goodwill for ministry with the people, shortly thereafter the novel ends with no resolution. The bleak conclusion caused a firestorm when first published. People were faced with the truth that mission is not just a series of heroic triumphs, but rather that God allows things to happen, like premature death, and tremendous suffering for His ultimate purposes, inevitably evoking the profoundest of questions.

Elliot received thousands of letters from people impressing on her how wrong she was to write a book like this, that God would never allow a dedicated Christian to suffer, especially one who serves on the mission field. Of course as you know, this is almost exactly what happened to Elliot. Although the novel was fictional, it was really a book about her. She wrote the book for Christians to understand that God often does not work the way we think he should, but His plan is still perfect and so much better than ours.

If you have a God that you believe will not let you suffer, then you have created your own God, you've created a graven image. If we believe we are servants of Christ, slaves of Christ, then God has the right to do with us as He pleases, not what we think he should do.